Twitter engineering quality

Jan 7 28 Comments

I find twitter being able to hire a lot of top notch talent these days. How do twitter insiders feel
About this ? Feels like early 2010s when twitter was all the rage.

#twitter #hired #quality #offer #culture

106 PARTICIPANTS MULTIPLE SELECTIONS ALLOWED
VOTE VIEW RESULT

comments

Want to comment? LOG IN or SIGN UP
TOP 28 Comments
  • Twitter
    jnjKluAw

    Go to company page Twitter

    jnjKluAw
    Twitter has horrible engineering rigor, standards and tooling. Everything takes forever, basic aspects of the SDLC (like trivially easy containerized sequence of CI/CD build steps) are completely lacking and you have to go through Aurora with custom jobs and all kinds of byzantine issues with networking and permissions. It’s like 15 years behind basic standards of the industry.

    Pretty much all of it happened under Jack’s watch and/or was allowed to atrophy and decay under his watch.

    Contrary to hiring good talent (I have zero clue where the OP is getting that from) we have overleveled lots of junior people and we do nothing to retain really good experienced people. We bring in people for initiatives like UX research, data / ML privacy & ethics, and new products (unfortunately including crypto nonsense), and they all just do nothing in part because institutional blockers prevent any real progress and in part from becoming disgruntled at how utterly juvenile and naive our product leadership is. Many of them leave within months or a few years.

    Health and content moderation is particular is a horrrriibbblllleeee dumpster fire. Just look at the recent press coverage on Spaces and how our internal product leader for that area is such a weak coward that all he can do is shrill denial and refusal to engage with legit criticism. We are even hearing about things like the moderation team for January 6th anniversary from public news sources, no internal communication or management. It’s a complete circus.

    I am absolutely baffled how anyone thinks Twitter has good engineering reputation or good product reputation around platform health / content safety & moderation. These are quite likely our two worst aspects as a company.
    Jan 8 20
    • Twitter
      KMqG05

      Go to company page Twitter

      KMqG05
      jnjKluAw is just keeping it real
      Jan 10
    • Amazon
      bananator

      Go to company page Amazon

      bananator
      Imagine working 9-5 is doing the bare minimum, the willingness of these people to slave away for some billionaire ( and rationalize it as “career growth “ ) is beyond me . Twitter is obviously salty for some reason, I have heard good things about the company
      Jan 19
  • Twitter
    twerpy

    Go to company page Twitter

    twerpy
    It's a mix of mission and ambition.

    A lot of the really talented engineers directly said that how Twitter was approaching health and misinformation as a platform was appealing because it gave them a place to work at scale and at a social media platform with large upside without having to sacrifice their values and sell (or continue selling) their sole to zuck and evil corp. Unfortunately a lot of them explicitly mentioned Dorsey and his leadership lol.

    The other part was our ambition put on display during our investor conference where we laid out some huge goals . If Twitter were to execute really well and hit some key product features and reach out goals, then we'd have huge upside and there would be a ton of stock growth. We have huge reach but still a relatively small userbase and revenue.

    Remote from anywhere without any exemption or negotiation alsl helped.

    As a long time employee who's become jaded I feel bad for them because I think they'll slowly start to realize how rudderless the ship is and also go WTF as Twitter continues to hire terrible talent at the same time.
    Jan 8 2
  • Twitter / Eng
    Larry🐥

    Go to company page Twitter Eng

    PRE
    Google
    Larry🐥
    The standards can’t be that high. They hired me. 🤣
    Jan 9 0
  • Adobe
    TNmw11

    Go to company page Adobe

    TNmw11
    Why do you feel that way?
    Jan 7 1
  • Amazon
    fqontys

    Go to company page Amazon

    fqontys
    I’m feeling the same. Twitter starts to be able to hire the best engineers again for whatever reasons (maybe for remote? WLB with decent pay? Stock upside potential?)… But the new hires are only gonna perform after 1 year, so we’ll see.
    Jan 8 0